A portlet for emotional exhibition

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Monthly Archives: September 2012

Thistles and brambles come to mind as think on the past 30 days of my life; unexpected and unwelcome.

The badge of martyrdom on my chest as I go through the relationship gauntlet, ironically having to contend with both ends of the spectrum. Simultaneously, and reluctantly I play the role of the one letting go and being let go. I’m forced to sort through demons, skeletons, and ruptured fantasies – a ruthless learning curve at this stage of my life. While my heart is traversing through the blender, I am faced with the daily agony of a job that ruins me, and stirs a hate that burns in my eyes. I can imagine worse occupations than being an educator, but even they seem attractive in comparison to the demoralization and savagery in which I’m exposed to daily. I actually wish for death and then think, then they know they’ve won. So, I keep coming back each day to spite them and the system. I wish it were only love and money at the epicenter of my toiling, but alas the mischievous health card rears its ugly mug. It’s not sitting well with me, this idea of abnormality in the most private of places. No matter how stated, in passing, or in seemingly benign terms of pre- anything…cancer is never a word that can be quelled in an overactive mind.

Is this the proverbial “chickens coming home to roost”? Am I just now culling the karma?

When asked his definition of love, Bukowski responded by saying,”love is a fog that burns with the first day light of reality.”

Fleeting and transient, indeed. A veil that can cloud and confuse into a seeking; a searching. It is dissipated by the unmistakeable directness of the light of certain truths. Reality, not the charms of desire or expectation must illuminate in the darkened, husky smoke that often bewilders.

Even so, each dawn since returning from Europe, I went to unfurl my feelings, wear them on my sleeve with abandon. I let reality know I couldn’t be bothered even though it spoke to me through intuition. It tried to sober me up at times, but I kept drinking becoming more inebriated with my own surging. I knew that we would have to have a sit down soon, but I frequently rescheduled.

Deep down I knew that this “love” was teetering; unraveling, but I poured myself into it – I wanted to. Despite having had written about it weeks before, never sending my words off, thinking they were insecurities; I only really placated my intuition until there was no more fog.

The light shines bright now, bright enough to help me see. I needed to see.

Humans shed 30 to 40,000 skin cells a day or up to 8 pounds a year, making way for a new skin to emerge. Though it is clearly a biologic process, it could easily be regarded in the same breath, as a constant state of renewal -being reborn on a daily basis. Certainly, this is not a novel idea and has been used reflexively in many contexts to indicate transformation and growth. Transition to transformation – outgrowing the old skin – is a theme so many of us glom on to as we move, unceremoniously, from one chapter to the next.

It’s just not ridding oneself of the impractical facades, but ideas and ingrained paradigms we cast off to make for new methodology in our daily lives with the intention of bursting forth out of our own stagnation. That’s what we’re really afraid of, is dying in our own immutable shells. There must be purpose and meaning in the receiving of each breath and the alternate pushing of it out. No matter what’s behind it – inspired by God or not – we crave insight as we move through experience after experience; shedding our skin in the process.

Late spring, after years of long winters, the dullness and haziness of a skin I had worn regained a vitality. It took place across the desert, even further across the ocean, and back again when I broke through to welcome another incarnation; the culmination and destruction of a life in stasis.